ALONGSIDE Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim, Kracauer was the third
major film critic of the Weimar Republic to be forced into exile. We
can quite unabashedly term him one of the founders of film theory,
who, in his essays of the 1920s, had already foreseen with great perspicacity many of the later cultural developments traced in The Mass
Ornament. In a manner that went well beyond what one would expect
from a newspaper film critic in terms of aesthetic or other value judgments, Kracauer detected in individual films a new culture that arose
with cinema. In this context, he was just as interested in the dominating architecture of the cinema houses as he was in the hierarchical
structure of the dramatics and the stage sets of the films proper. Kracauer paid special attention to both areas, which unjustly earned him
the reputation of someone more interested in a sociological analysis of
the films' contents than in the aesthetic revaluation they sparked.

A lecture he held in 1932 before Berlin cinema owners and titled
“Über die Aufgabe des Filmkritikers” (On the tasks of a film critic) has
for far too long been regarded solely as a profession of his beliefs on
the subject. The fact that an element of provocation may have been
involved has gone unnoticed. Above all, his pronouncement that “a
premier film critic … is only conceivable as a social critic” is what
commentators have remembered and has been wrongly equated with
the following: “His mission is: to uncover the social ideas and ideologies concealed in your average film and, by means of these revelations, to break the influence of the films themselves wherever necessary.”
1 Even at the time, Kracauer knew that ideology critique could
not simply be used as a political and practical instrument, and he
was, of course, aware that a critic's pronouncements were hardly
going to help precisely where it was necessary to break a film's spell.
One of the first studies Kracauer composed in exile in New York was

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